Playing the game
I have to admit, finishing Lolita often felt like a chore. I found the pace painfully slow, and Humbert’s omphaloskeptical narration boring and annoying. I wonder if this was another Nabokovian attempt to separate the men from the boys, so to speak. Just as the offending subject matter and the lack of graphic sex scenes serve to weed out readers who would take the book too literally or skim it looking for erotica, Humbert’s writing style is yet another obstacle in the path of the casual reader.
The only thing that kept me reading to the end was Nabokov’s game of authorial hide-and-seek. My waning interest in the subject matter of the book became less significant as I appreciated more coincidences and Nabokov’s clever wordplay. I was proud of myself if I noticed something before I read the annotation pointing it out, and even if I wasn’t a worthy opponent without the help of the annotations, seeing the game unfold between Nabokov and the annotator (Alfred Appel) was as exciting as watching any other kind of sporting event.
According to Appel, Nabokov appears “everywhere in the texture but never in the text” (Appel 425). For example, when Humbert leaves Lolita on the tennis court to take a fabricated call from “Birdsley,” he sees her through the window playing doubles against Bill and Fay (Nabokov 235). Of course, her partner is Humbert’s ‘double,’ Quilty. The pun inherent in this situation, a doppelganger playing in a doubles tennis match, could have been engineered only by Nabokov. Additionally, the “sisterly mirror reversal” of the names Melanie Weiss (Black White) and Blanche Schwarzmann (White Blackman) is “a verbal relationship that once again reveals the author’s hand” (Appel 449). Other such verbal relationships include Miss Horn and Miss Cole, whose names Lolita charmingly transposes and combines to form “cornhole,” a vulgar term for anal sex (Nabokov 195). Miss Lester and Miss Fabian have a similar relationship.
The Ramsdale “class list” could more accurately be described as a “cast list” of minute cameos throughout the book. For example, the Beales’ father kills Charlotte Haze on p. 98, the Miranda twins are mentioned again on p. 136, Stella Fantasia gets married on p. 289, Louise Windmuller appears on p. 4, her father on p. 290, and of course, Humbert refers to McFate numerous times throughout the narrative (Appel 361-2). ‘Coincidentally,’ the number 342 is the address of the Haze house, the room in The Enchanted Hunters hotel where Humbert and Lolita have sex, and the total number of motels they stay in during their first year on the road. The numbers of Quilty’s fake license plates all add up to 52, which is the number of weeks Humbert and Lolita spend on the road, the number of lines in Humbert’s poem, and the year in which Humebert, Lolita, and Qulity die, 1952.
As we discussed in class, the excerpt from Who’s Who in the Limelight not only represents the characters of Humbert, Lolita, and Quilty, but “prefigures” and “magically mirrors” the novel’s action (Appel xxviii, xxx). One of the many examples is The Murdered Playwright, a play attributed to Quilty in Who’s Who, that foreshadows Humbert’s actual murder of Quilty. Quilty is also the playwright of The Strange Mushroom, which Humbert refers to as “the ingenious play staged for me” (Nabokov 305).
Nabokov subtly reveals his presence and omnipotence with games of clever wordplay and unlikely coincidences, which draw a careful reader more deeply into the book by issuing a challenge s/he can’t refuse. The reader gets the satisfaction of knowing s/he is “getting it,” unlike the more pedestrian readers who give up on the book because of its subject matter, lack of smut, or writing style.
